The UpTake: For the payments industry, bitcoin is a major threat because it could remove credit card processing outfit's middleman fees. But it's not so far-fetched to imagine those same threatened companies getting in on the game by buying bitcoin startups.

If Gallippi is concerned about deeper-pocketed competition, he’s not showing it.

“BitPay’s advantage is that it has a three-year head start,” he said. “If others were to start building a platform now for bitcoins, they would go through the growing pains and scalability issues that we had, and we solved, a long time ago,” Gallippi said.

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